Water Management at Angkor

Abstract

Angkor was the capital city of the Khmer kingdom from the latter half of the first millenniumAD. At its peak in the eleventh to twelfth century AD, the Khmer kingdom incorporated Cambodia, southern Vietnam, southern Laos, and parts of Thailand. Angkor was the primate city of this vast kingdom and was connected to a network of smaller, satellite cities by an extensive road system (Hendrickson, 2010). King Jayavarman II founded Angkor, it is commonly said, in 802 AD, proclaiming himself the universal king and unifying a constellation of smaller chiefdoms that were grouped by Chinese visitors under the generic names “Funan” and “Chenla.” However, this date comes from a stone inscription (K235; Coedes & Dupont, 1943–1946) written hundreds of years after the events it depicts, and its veracity is widely questioned (Vickery, 1998). Indeed, many of the early state temples that characterized Angkor’s urban form may be much older than the epigraphic evidence suggests (Penny et al., 2006; Pottier, 1996). Whatever the date of Angkor’s establishment as a city, it likely emerged from a long period of occupation in the area that dates back to the second millennium BC. No primary historical documents (stone inscriptions in Khmer and Sanskrit) from Angkor are known after the end of the thirteenth century AD. Monumental construction in the capital also ceased at this time. It is not until the late sixteenth century that European visitors – initially Portuguese missionaries and merchants – began to describe Angkor (Groslier, 1958). At that time, the city was in ruin, almost completely abandoned and overgrown with forest. More detailed accounts emerged in the nineteenth century from explorers such as Henri Mouhot – often incorrectly credited with the “discovery” of Angkor in 1860 – and in the subsequent and ultimately ill-fated “Mekong Expedition” of 1866, led by Doudart de Lagree (Osborne, 1996). The romantic notion of the ruined city conjured in nineteenth-century Europe by these reports from the Far East was, in part, fanciful. Angkor was never completely abandoned by the Khmer, and in fact the city was re-occupied – if only briefly – by a Khmer king in the 1550s. AngkorWat was probably continuously occupied by Theravāda Buddhist monks, and significant construction occurred in the sixteenth century at Angkor Wat and extensively within the enclosure of Angkor Thom (Jacques, 2007).